In Junot Díaz’s short story collections, Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose
Her (2012), sound plays a crucial role in the representation of the experiences of
the Dominican migrants in the United States who populate their pages. The collections
show the liminal situations which the stories’ characters face, emphasizing
their shifting acoustic environments and the pressure to shape one’s own sonic
identity to meet the demands of the new language and culture. The experiences of
these Dominican migrants – particularly how they are targeted by the Americans
they encounter because of their accents – reflect the politics of a cultural neoracism
which differs from the discourse of colonial Otherness but which bears the
same monocultural logic. As such, the stories’ migrants become silenced rather
than invisible. At the same time, a belief in the power of the Other’s personal and
culturally specific voice as a transformative element is emphasized in these collections
with Díaz’s use of Spanish and the narrator’s persistent presence throughout
all of the stories.
